Young People Know the Real Truth

By Sam Eisenstein

Polly and Jaybird are twins. Polly was born blind and relies on her loving brother for practically everything until they both find themselves responsible to save their family, their unexpected helpmates, and their community, proving that you don't have to be rich or powerful to be successful in life. Polly and Jaybird, like the flying creatures of their namesakes, learn to be free of any and every tie.



‘Cold Moon and Hoot’ is an attempt to bridge the gap between human and animal because there needn't be one. It's possible for there to be such sympathy that kinship can overcome fear and the sense of what is alien. Exciting times between Cold Moon and Hoot lead to ever more as they grow toward maturity and beyond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839781803

Book preview

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Polly and Jaybird

1

In the dark, Polly reached out and grabbed Jaybird’s wrist, squeezing it until he awoke, yelling ‘Ouch!’

‘Jaybird, it was beautiful, I could see perfectly.’

‘You could see what? You know you hurt? Couldn’t you wait til tomorrow? We’ve got to be in school in about three hours.’

Polly felt at the table next to her bedside. ‘Five hours and twenty four minutes. It was beautiful,’ she said, dreamily. She threw off her covers and sat down on the side of Jaybird’s bed.

He sighed. He knew she would tell him her dream no matter how long it took for her to get his attention. That was how you remembered dreams, by telling them or by writing them down, she told him. Since she would wake him up either way--telling or with the tap-tap of her Braille stylus, he settled down to listen.

‘Wait a minute, I’ve got to go to the bathroom,’ he muttered.

‘Well, hurry up and don’t forget to--’

‘For pete’s sake, you wake me up and then blame me in advance for forgetting to put the seat down. Tell Dad about it, I never forget. I have to fish you out when you get flushed down the john,’ he said as he plodded down the hall toward the bathroom.

‘I wasn’t going to remind you of that, it’s the--’

As the crash of a pail reverberated through the little house, their father flung open the door of the kitchen, where he sat in his wheel chair often through all the long hours of the night, and yelled: ‘Can’t you kids ever give me any peace? You both want a couple belts?’

‘Sorry Dad,’ Polly said, no fear in her voice.

Jaybird said nothing, but he whispered, when he got back to the bedroom, ‘He wasn’t asleep. He’s never asleep. What’s he so bent out of shape about?’

‘He could have run into it.’

‘So what, he can’t fall down in a wheel chair.’

‘You left it there,’ Polly said. ‘What if I had bumped into it?’

‘You never do. Dad can’t, and you don’t, I’m the only clumsy one.’

Polly gave Jaybird another squeeze, not so hard, to let him know she thought he was fine, and to prepare him to listen to her dream.

‘Mother was here,’ Polly said softly. ‘She told me--she was wearing the beautiful sari, and--’

‘What’s a sari?’

‘It’s a kind of Indonesian wrap-around sort of dress and it’s dyed beautiful colors like a rainbow and it shines and shimmers as you walk around in it. She flew in through the open window and the curtains flapped on both sides and curved back like the wake around the bow of a ship.’

Jaybird closed his eyes so as to become as close to what Polly was as she talked about their mother. Neither of them had ever seen her except in fuzzy black and white old photos in the dog-eared photo album that Jaybird described to Polly.

Polly took a deep breath. ‘She was beautiful, she was smiling.’

This was not news. Mother was always smiling and encouraging, not like the reality they lived with. They never told Dad the dreams about their mother. They were afraid he would find some way to stop them.

‘She came into the room and she was in the air. She looked around and she wasn’t happy with the way the room is furnished, so she smiled and everything changed. There were two new beds and the wardrobe wasn’t peeling in front anymore.’

‘No more splinters!’ Jaybird whispered enthusiastically.

‘And there was the softest rug you can imagine, thick, good-smelling, you could roll all over it.’

‘Did she bring a dog?’ Jaybird asked eagerly.

‘She didn’t,’ Polly said seriously, ‘but there was a hint, if we’re very good, if we help Dad out, and if we don’t make him blow up, she’d bring us one.’

‘Fat chance of that,’ Jay said with disgust. ‘Just breathing makes him mad.’

‘She said he’s very sad and lonely. We have to try to cheer him up.’

‘Will you kids shut up and go to sleep? I don’t want to have to wake you up tomorrow,’ came their Dad’s roar from the kitchen, as he pounded on the wall with his stick.

Jaybird sighed. ‘If Mom came just to lecture us on our behavior we could just as well have a visit from the social worker.’

They both giggled.

‘I’ll remember the dream now we’ve talked. I’ll tell you more about it tomorrow.’

They turned around to opposite sides of the room, Polly with her eyes open, the better to see her dream again, Jaybird with his closed, to help form into pictures what his sister told him.

2

It seemed like about two minutes later that Polly was shaking Jaybird’s shoulder.

‘What’s the matter now?’ he muttered, ‘not another dream!’

‘No, silly, it’s time to get up.’

Jay couldn’t get used to it’s being time to get up in the dead of night just because it was winter.

He shivered. ‘Ten minutes more. Just the same time you stole from me last night because of your dream.’

‘My dream!’ and she stood up straight, her empty eyes looking intently at something only she could see. For a minute Jay went silent. He was amazed and in awe of his twin sister, who looked like him but was different in every other way. She stopped just as she was, her face glowing, when she was running a picture show in her head. He didn’t know whether in fact, she ran it, or whether it ran on its own time table regardless of Polly’s desire in the matter. But he knew that now she was not resisting it. She was seeing their mother again, maybe even more vividly than she had the night before. And as always, Jay waited for her to take his hand and describe it to him. He was amazed too that all of the colors, shapes and movements were descriptions he gave to her, and then she turned the raw material into beautiful stories that they could both enjoy.

As she didn’t say anything, Jay prompted her. ‘You were telling me that our mother’s got a job as a social worker in heaven.’

Polly grinned and slapped him lightly. ‘Things are going to get better. You wait and see if I’m right.’

In the bathroom Jay glanced around to see if everything was in place for Polly. She would find it all, but Jay didn’t like to cause her unnecessary work. The same was not true for his father, who spent his days and most of the night in his wheelchair. He would roar for Jay to bring him something Jay knew full well he would need.

Jay grudgingly filled the battered tea kettle with water from the leaking tap for his father, shuddering as he tried not to notice the cockroach scuttling away under the stove.

Dad yelled at him for stumbling on the pail, but he himself told Jay to put it there to catch the water dripping through the roof and ceiling. He sure knew when and where it was going to drip. Maybe that was one of the few good things about being glued to a wheelchair and always in the house, you became a kind of extension of it and you knew how it was going to react to things like rain. It had rained two nights before, but Dad only told him to put the pail there last night, and sure enough, an hour after the pail was in place, the drip started.

Jay paused in mid brush swing. That was the sort of thing Polly did too. Could it be that Dad and Polly were more alike than Polly and him? He felt his face blazing like when he had a sun burn.

Jealous. He was jealous, Polly would tell him. Sometimes he didn’t even need to have her around for her to tell him he was being silly or too hasty. She was in his head. Mom was in her head. Dad was--

Was too complicated. Too mean. Too ugly. Too insulting. Too lonely. He felt his own tears well up and he shook his head angrily and brushed his teeth fiercely. Why should I care about him when he never says a nice word to either of us?

The house rattled as the first of the garbage trucks rumbled past. Their house was on the street that was the direct route to the dump. The trucks sometimes left souvenirs of their passes through the more affluent parts of town--a rose bush branch with a rose or two still attached. Jay wondered how people who owned such beautiful things would throw them away like that. Sometimes Jay carefully cut away the faded flowers and gave Polly the good ones. She drank them in as though they were liquid. Jay described them, but when she talked about them later, Jay could hardly recognise the flower for the transformation in her mind’s eye.

Jay’s father made him sweep the street in front of the house twice a week to get rid of the less pleasant things that fell or blew from the trucks. After holidays Jay could hear them all night long as they whined in first and second gear up the hill to the dump, and then bumped and clattered down empty, as though chattering to each other after a hard job.

At least they were through for the day. It seemed to Jay he was never through. First, getting himself and Polly ready for school, but he also had to do chores for Dad. Then they had to catch the bus to go across town to the school that could accommodate Polly, the only one in town. They didn’t really accommodate her, they put up with her, Jay thought. Jay had had to fight with some guys who made fun of his blind sister. But that was over now. Nobody messed with Polly or him, but that also meant they spent a lot of time alone. He kept people away from his sister. Polly didn’t complain. She understood. She understood everything, Jay thought proudly and ruefully.

And then the long bus ride home again, house-cleaning, shopping for their dinner. He had to cut coupons every Thursday from the newspaper to save money. Polly did a lot of the cooking, but he had to put the makings in the correct places for her to find them, almost as much trouble as cooking himself.

If he had a bike, he could get to school in a fraction of the time, he could get a newspaper route, he could fly like the wind and tell Polly all about it. He had already found a way to save money for a bike. He collected bottles and cans. But on one hot summer’s day, every insect in the world descended on their yard and invaded the house, and his father, roaring, told him to get rid of them. Well, he had ten dollars from that, not enough.

‘We’ll find a way to get money for bikes,’ Polly assured him.

‘Bikes? What you mean bikes? I need a bike, I don’t need two bikes.’

‘One for me,’ Polly said.

‘You’re kidding, aren’t you, Pol? You can’t ride a bike.’

When Polly stayed silent, in that way she had, Jaybird cleared his throat nervously. ‘You can’t, can you?’

Polly answered sweetly: ‘You’ll teach me, Big Brother.’

Jay groaned. Another problem to face. And the heat he’d face from his dad. Once Polly had a vision, Jay had the job of making it real.

3

The dream about Mother wasn’t so solid in Polly’s mind as she described her to Jaybird. Things gradually assumed their shape, smell, color and even sound when the two of them whispered together. It was as though Jay were her amplifier. No, it was even more than that. When they talked, Polly had the use of Jaybird’s brain too. There was linkage, even though they were always attached, no matter how far from each other they strayed, but when something was particularly important they could turn up the power.

They? Polly was uneasy, because she wasn’t sure it was always they that did it. In fact, lately Polly saw that Jay sometimes actively resisted joining forces. He was a boy, Polly sighed, and wanted to do boy-things, he didn’t want to be one half of a person, he was trying to break away and perform on his own.

Well, let him, Polly thought, with a toss of her head, I don’t stop him. And thought, I do depend on him to show me the way. But I help him to understand the way. He doesn’t bother to, or he can’t, make sense of things.

But maybe he shouldn’t make such sense of things. Maybe we’re too strong together, and we’re a kind of, well, monster, because we’re stereo. Maybe at our age we’re only supposed to be mono.

Maybe we’re a kind of evolution, maybe instead of growing together like Siamese twins at the hip or some even more gruesome place, we share some brain function and no matter how hard we try to break apart, we’re stuck with each other.

I don’t mind it, but Jaybird does. At least for now. Maybe my job is to pave the way, make it easier, but I can only do that if I don’t flaunt it and make him resentful. After all, if we’re going to have to live this way for our entire lives, if I shut him out for now, maybe he’ll realize how much he needs me and won’t resent me so much later.

On the other hand, I need him now. I can’t see without him, I need to see as much as possible now. I need to store it up now for later. Who knows what kind of winter is coming?

And the winter Polly foresaw wore designer jeans, scruffy sandals and a t-shirt with an ad for a rock group. It wouldn’t be long. They were ten, and Polly was aware through her reading how close they both were to the dreaded ‘change.’

Jay already made fun of girls in a different way, kind of hushed. She was exempt, because she was Polly, not a girl. Polly was sure Jay never thought about her as a girl. They went unselfconsciously around their room with or without clothes, no more aware than one person is that he or she has clothes on or not.

Dad yelled, ‘Put on your clothes, there’s no shades on the windows.’ But he didn’t get any put on and Polly didn’t see the purpose of it. Finally Jaybird used an old sheet to cover their window from the street, more to keep the street lamp glare out than to keep privacy in.

The conclusion was that Polly needed to be more independent, and Jaybird had to be treated like a big fish--reeled in slowly, allowed to fight and dive to the bottom, but little by little brought into the boat. But was she going to eat him? She wasn’t going to eat him, no, no! they were part of one. He was her big brother and a wonderful person, much put upon by both her and her father, very burdened. But he needed her more than he thought, and he would need her more as he grew older. Her greatest need was now, to put the chestnuts into her nest, her treasury of images, pictures and events. Her world.

And a bicycle? She giggled. How horrified Jaybird was when she mentioned it. She knew how locked-in the idea was to him now. As soon as one or two elements of a situation were presented to him, he filled the rest in. He had the images for it. He was figuring out how to acquire the bikes, whereas before he had only himself in mind for a bike. She would direct him after he made it possible to move.

She walked easily toward the bathroom, sensing that the pail was no longer there. She heard their father snoring in his wheelchair. Probably he hadn’t covered himself with a blanket either. Did he find it more and more difficult to move himself from wheelchair to bed, and couldn’t or wouldn’t ask the children for help?

She had some of Jay’s resentment for their dad, always yelling at them, never giving them any credit for what they did do, instead of always yelling at them for what they didn’t. No, not them, usually Jaybird, even sneering at Polly’s pet name for Jay, calling him ‘Jailbird,’ when he didn’t obey or did something careless.

How many ten-year old boys would place the toothpaste exactly in the same place everyday, she thought, as she reached for and grasped the tube. All right, it was pushed in at the top and she had to equalize it, nobody’s perfect. In her hand, though, the tube that had been in Jay’s hand a minute or so earlier still felt of his sadness, his restlessness, his anger. She felt it in the metal, in the atoms of the toothpaste inside.

Suddenly she dropped the tube on the floor as though it had squirmed out of her hand. He had what in mind! He was planning to do what?

She stooped to retrieve the tube and bonked her head on the bottom side of the sink when she got up. She hoped for stars in her head, an indication she might still recover some sight. No. She waited, squatting on the floor. Oh, well.

She giggled. Jay would worry if he found her on the floor with the toothpaste. She got up hastily, feeling the rumble of the wheelchair. She reached for the door and closed it just before Dad could round the corner and roar at her, ‘Keep the door shut when you’re in the bathroom. This isn’t a